CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – For the second time this month, NASA called off a spacewalk due to spacesuit problems astronauts have seen before.
Monday morning, Mike Barratt and Tracy Dyson were getting ready to float outside the International Space Station when one of their suits had a water leak.
“Oh, my goodness,” Dyson told mission control. “My helmet fogged up.”
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The veteran spacewalker then followed up with, “I think we need to turn the water off. There’s water everywhere.”
Back on June 13, more trouble with the old, bulky spacesuits also cancelled a spacewalk.
Monday, as Barratt and Dyson turned around, Dyson told mission control she was very cold.
“I’ve got a frozen finger so if I could turn my glove heaters on, that’d be great,” she said.
As Dyson and Barratt made their way back inside, fellow astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of Boeing’s Starliner capsule were there to take pictures.
Wilmore photographed Dyson’s cold gloves.
“They are working to gather some extra imagery to really determine a cause of the leak,” a NASA commentator said during the broadcast.
NASA said that the astronauts are safe.
As for Wilmore and Williams’ return to Earth, NASA just told us on Friday it was delaying their undocking and splashdown again, in part because of the spacewalks, also because of Starliner’s engine problems and helium leaks.
CBS space expert Bill Harwood said there’s no reason to panic about the crew returning home safely.
“They’re cleared to come home in an emergency,” Harwood said. “If they really needed to come home right now, they could. It’s not like they’re stranded on the space station, but NASA just wants to get as much information as they can, before the crew comes home.”
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